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Looking Backward: 1870–1868–1864 “When a person breaks in, unannounced, upon the morning hours of an artist, and finds him not in full dress, the intruder, and not the surprised artist, is doubtless at fault.”1 So ends the preface to Passages from the English Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and with it Sophia Hawthorne’s public silence as editor of her late husband’s journals. Although a subsequent version of the preface would excuse the editor as a “friend” rather than an “intruder,”2 it’s worth pausing to consider this extraordinary statement by the author’s spouse of twenty-two years, the “inmost wife” and collaborator who, Nathaniel once informed a correspondent, “speaks so near me that I cannot tell her voice from my own”(CE 18: 256).3 Seeking to deflect criticism of the notebooks themselves, Sophia represents her editorial self as an impersonal “person,” divorced from her usual role as protector and first reader of her husband’s work, who flouts Victorian decorum by uncovering to the public what should remain private.4 Her language echoes most immediately a New York Times review of Passages from the American Note-Books, published in 1868: “Here in the Note-Books, we come upon Hawthorne’s genius in undress—taken, perhaps, somewhat at a disadvantage—caught unawares—or, at all events, not always set off with the adornments and trappings of his art.” (The Times review had, in addition , complained of the text’s lack of “a word of preface or explanation of any kind”: Idol and Jones 314.) At the same time, the radical alienation detectable in Sophia’s choice of metaphor has its precedent in her own words, for example, the stunned eulogy she wrote to her friend Annie • 3 • This Is His—This Is My Mystery The Common Journal of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, 1842–1843 marta werner and nicholas lawrence 4 • conversations, dialectic discourse, self-representations Fields upon Nathaniel’s death in May 1864: “In the most retired privacy it was the same as in the presence of men. The sacred veil of his eyelids he scarcely lifted to himself. Such an unviolated sanctuary as was his nature, I his inmost wife never conceived nor knew.”5 Two months later, responding to publisher James T.Fields’s pleas to publish excerpts from the notebooks in The Atlantic Monthly, she wrote: “The veil he drew around himself no one should lift. . . . He gave all he wished to give. Who shall wrench more from him?” (Stewart 299).In turning to the quasireligious image of a veiled oracle, Sophia of course echoes Hawthorne’s own favored metaphor for the mystery of subjectivity: “So far as I am a man of really individual attributes , I veil my face,” as the narrator explains in “The Old Manse” (CE 10: 33).To try to lift the veil of the “inmost Me”that the author promises not to divulge is to risk turning “Hawthorne,” if not ourselves, into a character from one of his tales. Nowhere is the strangeness of Sophia’s preface more apparent than in relation to the journal they kept in common during the first year of their marriage. Catalogued as MA 580 in the Pierpont Morgan Library, this notebook contains the intermittent record of newlywed life in Concord that Hawthorne would later draw on for his preface to Mosses from an Old Manse. Like its companion journal, MA 569, documenting the early years as the Hawthorne family grew to include five members, the Old Manse journal remains unpublished in entirety. Sophia’s edited version of Nathaniel ’s contribution to MA 580, replete with emendations, truncations marked by ellipses, and silent omissions, was published in the July 1866 issue of The Atlantic, part of the serialized excerpts from his American journals that appeared each month of that year. These excerpts came out in book form in 1868, published in the United States and England, and were reissued virtually unchanged through numerous printings and editions until Randall Stewart produced his restored and corrected edition of the American notebooks in 1932. Stewart’s work became the basis for the updated Centenary Edition published in 1972,but not until 1996 did Patricia Dunlavy Valenti publish Sophia’s portion of the common journals in Studies in the American Renaissance.6 Important as this work of restoration is, the journal as it has come down to us duplicates the severe separation of gendered spheres that marked domestic ideology in the nineteenth century...

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